Category Archives: Campaign finance

Fair Warning: The Cow Lady is Back

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I guess Andrea Murray wasn’t discouraged by a state Senate campaign that, in the Republican wave year of 2024, saw her finish a distant fourth in the deep-blue Windsor district — and blow a big hole in her family’s bank account because she lavishly self-funded her own campaign. Much of her money was spent on two different out-of-state consultancies that shamelessly ripped her off did her no favors at all. Her investment paid the tiniest of dividends; she finished less than two percentage points ahead of two Republicans who barely campaigned at all. (The above screenshot was taken from a two-minute campaign video lavishly produced by one of those consultancies.)

Also, she regularly and wildly flouted campaign finance reporting laws, a practice she has carried forward into 2026. As noted previously, she missed the March 15 and July 1 deadlines despite spending at least some money on Vermont Daily Chronicle ads, a wasteful practice since the vast majority of VDC readers live outside Windsor County. One could argue that the ads could connect her to the wider conservative donor class, except she has yet to attract more than a handful of donors outside her own pocket.

Well, folks, on July 26 she filed both of this year’s reports at once plus the report that was due on July 1 of last year. And there are only five days to go before the next deadline. Great. We’ll probably see her August 1 report sometime in October. Too bad there are no penalties for late filing, thanks to the Legislature’s self-dealing on campaign finance issues.

Anyway, a look at her latest reports shows that she’s not doing anything different from two years ago. Still running in a district that hasn’t elected a Republican to the state Senate since 1994, still pouring her own money into a certain-to-lose campaign, still attracting little money from the rest of the human race.

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Are the Republicans Even Trying for the State Senate?

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I’ve done a fairly close reading of the July 1 campaign finance reports for state Senate candidates (So You Don’t Have To), and one thing jumped right out at me: Republican candidates are be doing little or nothing.

Including at least a couple of incumbents. It’s remarkable.

A couple of caveats apply. Few of these people face primary competition, so it’s early. And in 2024, the Barons of Burlington swarmed in after the 4th of July and dumped four-figure checks into the campaign accounts of several Republican Senate candidates plus LG hopeful John Rodgers. They could still do the same this year. We eagerly await the August 1 campaign finance deadline.

But there’s one fact, previously noted in this space, that makes me think it might not happen. In the spring of 2024, Gov. Phil Scott’s campaign blew a bunch of money on polling. A curious expenditure, given that he had clear sailing in his bid for another term. From the course of events it’s easy to infer that the polling focused on other races, specifically LG and the Senate. Because it was after the polling that (a) the Barons activated their checkbooks and (b) Scott himself got off his ass and actively campaigned for those key candidates.

Well, this spring the Scott campaign did virtually nothing. It spent a mere $7,000 between March 15 and July 1, and none of it was for polling. I can’t say for sure that Scott and the Republicans have given up on extending their legislative gains of 2024, but it’s kinda-sorta starting to look that way. They may be content with preventing a return of Democratic supermajorities. Which should be achievable; I think it’ll be a long time before the Dems win 20 seats in the Senate again.

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A Curious Candidacy in the Windsor Senate Primary (Updated)

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This, friends and neighbors, is Ben Brickner, Democratic candidate for state Senate in the Windsor district.

Practically oozes Vermontitude, doesn’t it? Appropriately faded ballcap, fleece quarter-zip, jeans, rurally appropriate dog, outdoorsy backdrop. Touch of gray in the close-cropped beard. His campaign website leans heavily on his service as chair of the Pomfret selectboard. Cool.

But looky here. This is also Ben Brickner.

Tempting to offer a remark about the Hair Club for Men, but that would be mean. So let’s get to the heart of the matter. The bespoke-suited Ben Brickner is a partner in the New York City law firm Person Ferdinand who specializes in “corporate finance, securities, and capital markets transactions,” according to the Pierson website. Pierson is headquartered in NYC but has 18 offices around the United States plus an outpost in London. Kind of a big deal.

You won’t see a hint of that in any of his campaign materials, nor in a flattering story about his candidacy in The Mountain Times.

What’s more, Brickner’s July 1 campaign finance filing is a real eye-opener. He has raised a stunning $65,000 so far, including 18 maximum individual contributions of $1,940 plus another seven gifts of $1,000 or more.

That would have been virtually unprecedented for any state Senate race until 2024, when the Barons of Burlington threw their weight behind several Republican candidates for Senate and, well, Stewart Ledbetter. But I doubt there’s ever been any candidate for any office in Windsor County who’s raised anywhere near $65,000.

If you live in the Windsor district, you should expect a flood of mailings from Team Ben before the August primary. He spent only $12,000 as of July 1, so he’s got more than $50,000 burning a hole in his pocket.

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A Curious Gathering of Lobbyists in a State Senate Primary

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I’ve spent too much time in recent days going over campaign finance reports for all the races for state Senate. Well, all but Richard Westman’s unopposed bid for a [checks notes] twenty-fourth consecutive term in the Legislature. I think I’m safe in skipping that one.

There’s a lot to report, and it’ll be coming your way very soon. But here’s a little something I discovered that’s worth a moment of your time. It’s fairly small potatoes, but it might develop into something more.

The Senate race in the Orange district features incumbent Republican John Benson making his first bid for a full term (he was appointed in January to replace Larry Hart, Sr., who found out that lawmaking is hard work) and two Democratic hopefuls: State Rep. Monique Priestley and retired Department of Labor staffer Rose Lucenti. The seat is historically Democratic; it flipped Republican in the 2024 wave election, so the Democratic nominee will have a decent shot at unflipping it.

Priestley is doing just fine, thanks. She entered the cycle with $6,400 in the bank and proceeded to raise a healthy $23,000. She’s spent a bit more than $6,000, so she entered July with roughly $23,000 in cash on hand. That’s already enough money to compete in a mostly rural district.

Where things get a little intriguing is in Lucenti’s latest report.

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The Money Race Is, As They Say, Heating Up. In Some Precincts, Anyway.

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The first of July marked the most important pre-primary campaign finance deadline for Vermont candidates. The occasion was marked by a depressing lack of coverage in our respectable media. VTDigger ran a boilerplate piece that reported a bunch of numbers but offered little insight. Seven Days and Vermont Public didn’t do anything, as far as I can tell. Our daily papers are a wasteland for political coverage and I rarely watch local TV news, which is largely an exercise in cranking out enough easy content to space out the advertising.

Which is a damn shame because there are definite points of interest, and because this is the most meaningful pre-primary snapshot of the money races. The previous deadline of March 15 was so early that some major candidates (Aly Richards, for instance) had yet to toss their metaphorical hats in the ring. The next deadline of August 1 is very close to primary day, so whatever might be revealed in those reports won’t have much of a chance to sink in.

Altough that’s kind of a moot point since the media is largely ignoring campaign finance altogether. If there was a nuclear revelation to be found, chances are nobody would notice and it would go unreported.

So let’s get to the July 1 numbers and what they tell us about Campaign 2026.

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Campaign Finance Deadline #1: The Money’s Going to Some Unexpected Places

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So March 15 was the first campaign finance deadline (in Vermont) of 2026, and the second won’t come until July 1, mere weeks before the August primary. Yesterday was a big day, in other words, and there were some clear winners in the field. And not necessarily the winners you’d want, if you were to distribute the available Democratic dollars to the top-priority contests.

Which are, to my eye: Running a credible race for governor, rebuilding the state Senate majority, and knocking Lt. Gov. John Rodgers off his perch. It will be no shock whatsoever to learn that the usual Democratic donors seem to be paying little attention to the gubernatorial, and a lot of cash is being funneled into primary contests for safe Democratic seats. The only race where priority and cash are equivalent is in the Democratic race for lieutenant governor.

One saving grace: Many of the top fundraising candidates were drawing, in part, from unique sources of support rather than draining the mainstream Democratic pool. Many of Nikhil Goyal’s many, many donors, for instance, wouldn’t have given to anyone else.

The race for biggest moneybags of March is a virtual tie between Molly Gray and Ryan McLaren, Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor. They each raised more than $150,000, which is awfully impressive. Lookin’ like a red-hot race there.

Biggest moneybags per capita: state Senate candidate Goyal, who raised the eye-popping sum of $86,193.

Much better than expected: Recently declared Democratic candidate for governor Amanda Janoo, who cleared the $80,000 mark. That’s a really strong start, but she still has a ton of work to do.

Highest burn rate: Treasurer Mike Pieciak, who somehow managed to spend close to $60,000 in the early stages of a race for re-election he’s all but certain to win. Much of that cash went to expensive out-of-state campaign operatives. It’s almost as if he’s laying the groundwork for a seemingly inevitable run for governor.

There are your toplines. For those as obsessed with campaign cash as This Observer, more details follow.

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John Rodgers is STILL a Campaign Finance Scofflaw

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Hey, remember December 17, when I broke the news that Lt. Gov. John Rodgers’ campaign had reported spending 31.5% more money than it had received? (His final filing for 2024 reported receiving $216,468 and spending $288,588.01.) Curious thing for a tough-minded fiscal conservative, right?

Now, remember when someone in The Respectable Media finally deigned to report on Rodgers’ faulty filings?

One and a half months later?

Yeah, watchdogs, hahaha. (VTDigger, which couldn’t wait to breathlessly inform us that U.S. Rep. Becca Balint’s leadership PAC received small quantities of corporate cash, which is absolutely legal, has yet to publish a goddamn word about Rodgers’ violations of the law. Vermont Public, also silent.)

That single published report about Rodgers’ faulty filings, by Seven Days’ Kevin McCallum, quoted campaign manager Rep. Casey Toof as attributing the gross discrepancy to a pair of whopper-sized bookkeeping errors. McCallum also quoted Rodgers as whining about how hard it is to comply with campaign finance law.

Oh, boo hoo hoo, Johnny, everybody else manages to do it. Why not you, or your experienced politician of a campaign manager?

But enough about the past. Let’s bring things up to date.

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The Latest News on the 2026 Gubernatorial Race is… No News

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No one besides us pathological Vermont Political Observers will have noticed, but July 1 was not just Bobby Bonilla Day, it was also a milestone in the 2026 gubernatorial campaign: the only campaign finance filing deadline in the year 2025. In fact, the next deadline isn’t until March 15, 2026 — not much more than two months shy of the filing deadline for major party candidates. But then, we do love our myth that nobody runs for office until June of an election year.

In other words, it’s going to get late early. Which makes it especially disappointing for campaign finance sickos (raises hand with pride) that Tuesday’s deadline produced no hints whatsoever about the race for governor in 2026.

Going into the day, I was expecting that Treasurer Mike Pieciak might report a decent-sized pile, like in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if only to pre-empt a potential flood of Democratic candidates and an unpredictable dogpile primary á la 2010, when Jim Douglas was retiring and an entire generation of Democrats entered the race. Well, five Democrats, anyway. Four of ’em finished within four percentage points of each other, and Peter Shumlin won (by two-tenths of a percent over Doug Racine) with less than one-quarter of the vote. And we all know how that turned out (cough) EB-5, single payer health care, Scott Milne (cough).

I’m allowing myself a little historical tangent because it’s much more interesting than the great big nothing we got in Tuesday’s filings. The details follow. If you like disappointment, read on.

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Burlington Democrats are Spending Big to Defend Their Council Majority With a Lot of Help from the Leunig’s Frequent Diners Club

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On Town Meeting Day in Burlington, the Progressive Party has an opportunity to do what (according to Seven Days) it has never done before: Hold the mayor’s office and a majority on City Council at the same time. City Democrats are doing their best to ensure that doesn’t happen. And a lot of “their best” came straight from the city’s biggest name in real estate, the Pomerleau family.

We just found this out because the Burlington Democratic Committee has just filed its first campaign finance report for this year’s Town Meeting campaign season. The filing was 17 days late by my count. City party chair Andy Vota, in an email exchange, blamed the delay on difficulties with the Secretary of State’s new filing system which took multiple consultations to work out. Understandable. But as it worked out, the filing came immediately after Seven Days published its big pre-election article on the campaign, so the story makes no mention of the BDC’s fundraising or its highfalutin’ sources.

By state law, candidates and committees involved in Town Meeting Day elections must file financial reports 30 days and 10 days before election day. The BDC will have to turn around quickly to meet the second deadline. Missing the February 2 deadline is not nearly as egregious as the BDC’s 2020 violation, which resulted in a $2,500 fine for failing to file any disclosures until months after Town Meeting Day. (It’s quite unusual for campaign finance law violations to draw any penalty at all; normally, they can get off scot-free if they belatedly correct errors and omissions.)

So… how much does the party have and where did it come from?

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Sen. Sam Douglass, Campaign Finance Scofflaw

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The folksy Son of the Soil pictured above is Sam Douglass, senator-elect from the Orleans district. Or, as I find myself thinking of him, Senator Scofflaw. Because while he claims to be a “fierce advocate,” he was shockingly blasé about his legal obligations to report campaign finances accurately and promptly. Makes you wonder about his fierceness, not to mention his devotion to fiscal responsibility.

Because his campaign finance filings are the opposite of “responsibility,” and include numerous violations of state law. Fortunately for him, the penalties are laughably small and rarely enforced. Otherwise he’d be in a heap of trouble. As it is, maybe some Concerned Citizen will see fit to file a complaint with the Attorney General’s Office, for all the good that will do.

Let’s start with the fact that Douglass has yet to file his Final Report, which was due on December 15. And there’s a real need for a final accounting, because his most recent report leaves many questions unanswered.

His post-election filing, submitted on November 19, shows a serious imbalance between income and outgo — and not in the way you’d expect. The Douglass campaign has reported raising nearly $41,000 and spending only $27,460. Did he really leave one-third of his bankroll on the table in a race against Democratic Rep. Katherine Sims, who raised more than $76,000? Or has he failed to fully report his expenditures?

Vermont’s campaign finance law and the Secretary of State’s reporting system can be a challenge, but when you run for public office you are obliged to follow the rules. Besides, Senator Douglass is going to be responsible for writing the laws. Shouldn’t he be capable of obeying them?

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